


A Hand Reaching Down (When You're In Over Your Head)

by Telaryn



Category: Elementary (TV), Leverage
Genre: Bechdel Test, Betrayal, Crossover, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, Interrogation, Psychological Trauma, Revenge, Season 3 AU, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 02:18:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9051340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: Season 3 AU, in which the team escapes the Italian to go on the run.  Their first stop lands them in London, where Parker makes the acquaintance of one Kitty Winter - one of the last people she expects to have an agenda.Or a past trauma to rival her own.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Radiolaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/gifts).



> Somehow your prompts always inspire me in such fascinating and unexpected directions! I hope you enjoy the story - thank you for playing with us again this year!

Nate had changed all of them in one way or another. Parker had heard the others talk about it, so she knew she wasn’t the only one. She also knew that sometimes they regretted those changes – each of them in their own way. Hers was the fact that her first instinct now was to take people at face value. Trusting people was a risk she’d never learned how to embrace – but over and over the others had told her that it was a risk worth taking.

Except when it wasn’t.

 _Photos…files…_ Parker flipped through each one, her heart sinking even as her rage bloomed white hot in her head. The traitor even had a chart on the wall, showing connections between all of them and the people that mattered; Nate to Maggie, Sophie to Tara, Hardison to his Nana, Eliot to different people whose names she didn’t recognize, but who she figured had to be his family in Oklahoma.

She’d been conned. Tara had been a misunderstanding – there had been a lot going on at the time, and Hardison didn’t have time to do anything but react to the video footage he’d uncovered.

This? Parker wanted very badly to see Kitty explain all of this away.

They had only been in London a few days – and in fact, Nate and Sophie were still arguing about whether or not they were going to stay – when Parker had encountered Kitty perched in the spreading branches of an oak tree in a park a few blocks from the apartments Hardison had found for them. The sight of a grown woman sitting in a tree that wasn’t her was enough to catch the thief’s attention, and she had promptly climbed up and introduced herself.

Kitty hadn’t been overly friendly at first – something Parker now understood had been on purpose. She would have instinctively mistrusted someone who hadn’t been put off by her approach. She hadn’t left though, or asked Parker to leave, and after a few hours they’d been talking like – well, if not precisely _old_ friends, like people who had a chance at becoming new friends.

The team had been cautiously supportive when she’d told them at dinner that night – Nate had insisted that she get whatever information Hardison needed to run a background check, but Sophie had immediately squashed Eliot and Hardison’s insistence that they be allowed to meet Kitty in person. “This is Parker’s friend,” she’d announced to everybody. “It will be up to Parker who gets to meet her and when.”

“How about you meet Eliot now?” Parker growled, dropping the file she’d been looking through back on the stack. “I won’t let him bring anything more than his fists.” Turning slowly around, she took in the room and its contents one more time and tried to decide what she wanted to do.

After a seeming eternity, she held her breath for a count of seven, then blew it out sharply. If she was being honest with herself, she didn’t want to see Kitty hurt – not in the way Eliot could hurt her – but something had to be done. They needed to know how much of a threat Kitty was, and Parker wanted answers for herself. She was also fairly certain she was entitled to them.

 _Answers without punches..?_ Heading back for the window, Parker fired off a quick text to Sophie.  
**********************************  
Kitty prayed the hammering of her heart wasn’t obvious – the last thing she needed right now was Sherlock lecturing her on detachment… _again._ “It’s got to have been Parker,” she said, checking another pile to see if anything was missing. “I don’t understand why she left it all here, though?”

_“Is she the sort of person to assume you wouldn’t notice her intrusion?”_

Kitty started to say ‘no’, retreated a mental step, tried to say ‘yes’, and found that she couldn’t entirely support that answer either. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “All the files say she’s insane – it makes it difficult to predict what she might or might not do.”

She was braced for her teacher to launch into a monologue about her shortcomings and where she’d gone wrong, so it was a shock to Kitty when Sherlock said instead, _“Trust your instincts and your observations. Based on what you’ve told me, you’ve spent sufficient time with this woman to form an intelligent opinion of your own. Let that opinion inform your answer.”_

Pausing for a couple of breaths to steady herself, Kitty did as he’d instructed. “She’s angry,” she said finally. “She’ll go to the others to let them know what she’s found, but I don’t think she cares at this point whether I know she broke in or not.”

She could almost sense Sherlock nodding on the other end of the phone, and hoped it wasn’t her imagination. _”Then you have a problem. I suggest you contact DI Lestrade immediately and inform him of your concerns.”_

Kitty’s pulse jumped so quickly she put a hand over her chest. “You think she’s gone for reinforcements.” She didn’t make it a question.

 _”So do you,”_ Sherlock said. _”Go now.”_

Ending the call, Kitty slipped the phone in her pocket and decided to get out of the apartment before reaching out to hers and Sherlock’s contact at the Metro Police. Memories of what she’d read in the files on Eliot Spencer and what he had done to people in the past were swirling through her mind as she opened the door.

“Going somewhere, Miss Winter?”

Kitty drew up short with a gasp at finding herself face to face – not with Eliot Spencer – but Sophie Devereaux. Before she could find her courage or her tongue, Parker stepped in from the side, shoving her back into the apartment. “She’s not going anywhere,” the thief snarled. “She needs to explain herself first.”

The taser Parker had been holding at her side rose into Kitty’s view. A beat later her world was filled with chattering noise, white light and pain, followed by soft, blissful darkness.  
************************  
 _Bloody hell…_ Sophie thought, as she and Parker secured the tiny flat and hoisted the unconscious girl into a nearby chair.

And she was a girl – somewhere around Hardison’s age, if Sophie was any judge. It made a certain level of sense, once she had a moment to look at the entire picture – even after her rapid emotional growth of the past few years, Parker’s chronological age still outstripped her emotional one by many years. _If you want to set a hook for someone like Parker, you’d have be aware of that._

“What exactly are we going for here, Parker?” she asked, as the thief set about securing their prisoner in place with zip ties she’d taken out of a pocket in her jumpsuit. “You know I can’t scare her into telling you what you want to know – not like Eliot or Nate could.”

The thief looked genuinely startled. “I want you to scare her like you scare people.” She straightened up, hands clenched into fists. “I can be Eliot for this.”

Pivoting, she slapped the unconscious Kitty hard. Sophie swallowed hard, flipping through her mental rolodex of identities before settling on Annie Kroy. She wouldn’t actually have to become Annie for this to work, just assume that somewhere in that frankly terrifying mess of papers and photographs was enough information on her for Kitty Winter to know she needed to be afraid of someone like Annie.

Flinching at the sound of Parker slapping the girl again, Sophie forced herself to turn and walk calmly to one of the stacks of folders. Picking up the top one, she opened it to find a dossier on Nate as complete as anything she had to assume existed in any law enforcement database in the world by this point. _She’s not old enough to be law enforcement,_ she thought, flipping through enough of the sheets of paper to get a stronger handle on how much trouble they were in.

“That’s it,” Parker snapped. “Wake up, you traitor!”

“Parker…what?” The sounds of bonds being tested came next as Sophie tasted the undercurrent of fear in the girl’s confusion. _Good._

“That’s enough, Parker,” she said – turning back in time to stop the thief from engaging with their prisoner. Catching her teammate’s eye she added, “Get the boxes we brought. All of this is going to have to come with us, along with any computers or flash drives Miss Winter might have stashed away.”

Parker was clearly still in the mood to indulge her hurt feelings, but there was a reason she’d enlisted help instead of going after Kitty on her own. After a beat where she might have argued with Sophie, she nodded sharply and headed for the door.

“Now,” Sophie said, beginning a slow walk around Kitty until she was face to face with the girl, “while Parker takes care of the fruits of your labor, you and I are going to talk.”

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Kitty stated, even though the certainty of her words were undercut by the tears glinting at the corners of her dark eyes. “I’m not afraid of you.”

Slipping into the zone, Sophie went to her knees in front of Kitty – resting her hands lightly on top of the girl’s thighs. “That’s what frightens you, is it?” she asked, keeping her voice gentle. “Physical violence?”

She’d tripped her already. “That’s not…that’s not what I meant,” Kitty stammered. “I just meant that…”

“You just meant that you expected Parker to bring somebody like Eliot with her for this, right?” Off Kitty’s somewhat reluctant nod, Sophie chuckled softly. “Don’t worry – I’m not insulted. You see though, Parker’s smarter than people give her credit for. She needs information - _we_ need to know who put you on our trail. Having Eliot try to beat it out of you wouldn’t work though, because I suspect physical violence is something you are very familiar with and something you know all too well how to resist.”

Sophie was rewarded with a flinch, when she reached up to brush a stray tendril of hair back from the girl’s face. “What you have less experience resisting is the psychological – the thing that lurks in the darkness. The threat you never see coming.”

When she returned both hands to Kitty’s thighs, she felt the girl trembling. “I could tell you, for instance, that even though you’re not Interpol, you have some access that allowed you to see Agent Sterling’s report on what happened at the docks in Boston.” Allowing her smile to widen when Kitty didn’t give off a negative tell, she pushed ahead. “Is that all just a lucky guess, or have I already gotten inside your head?”

She paused for a moment when she heard Parker reenter the apartment, but instead of interfering, the thief began her assigned task of boxing up the intel Kitty had collected. Satisfied that she wouldn’t be unexpectedly interrupted, Sophie focused her attention back on Kitty. “The truth is, Miss Winter, we’ll find out soon enough who you’re working for. Depending on who that is, we will take care of them in our own time.”

Muscles tensed and flexed as Kitty tested her bonds again. Sweat was starting to show on the girl’s forehead. _Afraid of her employer?_ Something didn’t ring true about that conclusion though, so Sophie continued forward more carefully. “What I need from you are just two little things.” She held up a finger. “One – you promise me that you will cut ties with your employer and never come after us again.”

Kitty laughed at that, but there was no strength, no bravado in it. “And I suppose you would just believe me if I agreed?”

“You won’t turn on me,” Sophie said smoothly, studying the girl’s expression. “You said you know I don’t engage in violence; well, as a rule you’re right. I want you to think for a moment though, what it means to be able to claim kinship with the Kroy family.” She tilted her head slightly, making certain she had Kitty’s full attention. “I make one call, and those loyal to me and mine will be on your tail before sunset. There’s nowhere in London you’ll be safe.”

She registered that the girl’s trembling had grown exponentially worse, but Sophie had already moved on to the next bit of information she was after. “Two,” she said, holding a second finger up beside the first.

It was all she was able to get out before Kitty’s eyes glazed over, and she began hyperventilating. Startled, Sophie scrambled to her feet and stumbled back a few paces.

“What did you do?” Parker asked, from her place across the room. Wide-eyed, Sophie looked up at the thief.

“Nothing intentional!” she insisted. “I was going to ask her why she targeted you as her way in, when she just…” She gestured helplessly at Kitty, who had begun to cry openly, but quietly. _Almost as if she didn’t want to be heard?_

Sometimes Sophie hated her brain.

“Is it a trick?” Parker asked, setting down the box she’d been holding and moving closer.

She didn’t think so, but Sophie nevertheless reached out and touched the girl on the arm. “Kitty?”

Kitty went rigid, straining against her bonds. Her eyes widened, her expression terrified on a level Sophie doubted even she would be able to convincingly fake. _That’s one hell of a mental trip-wire you kicked there,_ she chided herself, even as her thoughts raced ahead on what they needed to do. “Parker, cut her free.”

Mercifully, the thief didn’t argue with her. “I think I accidentally triggered a flashback,” she explained to Parker, as the latter methodically sliced through the zip ties she’d used to secure Kitty to the chair.

“Is that like PTSD?” Parker asked. As the last tie came free, the two of them steadied Kitty between them .

Sophie nodded. “Exactly. Which means we just went way beyond what I think either of us signed up for. Help me get her to the bed.”

Cutting Kitty’s bonds seemed to have done most of the work of calming her down, but whatever nightmare Sophie had touched off in her psyche had taken its toll. Parker ended up taking most of the girl’s weight as they got her to the nearby bed. When they were laying her down, Sophie slipped Kitty’s phone out of her jeans. “Watch her,” she said to Parker. Showing the thief the phone she added, “Somebody cares what happens to this girl. I’m not prepared to take her to the hospital, but I’m also not going to leave her here without help.”  
**************************************  
 _You’ll never see me coming…_

_London isn’t safe for you. Not right now._

Panic had finally let her go, and Kitty couldn’t make herself do anything but lie on her thin, sagging mattress and breathe. On some level she knew that Parker and Sophie in her apartment still represented a very real threat, but Sherlock had spent months teaching her to look at a situation logically. Logically she didn’t have the strength to fight back right now. If she was very lucky she might be able to slip free of the apartment without either woman giving chase, but she would still lose all of her carefully amassed intel, and without her promise to leave off investigating the strange band of thieves…

 _Those loyal to me and mine will be on your tail before sunset._ Her tear ducts ached, and she felt herself begin to slip over the edge again, but Kitty forced herself to focus on her breathing before another panic attack could take her. She’d lost this round, and the sooner she admitted it to herself and accepted it, the better her chances of coming through it.

“Well, Mr. Holmes, I’d suggest you contact someone here in London who can help this girl.”

They’d called Sherlock. Groaning, Kitty curled up on her side and tried to cover her ears.

A sharp poke in the side brought her eyes open. Parker had crouched beside her bed, and was staring intently at her – much too close for Kitty’s comfort. “Are you going to barf?”

It took a second for Kitty to process the question. “What? No.”

Parker seemed to relax somewhat then. “Okay, good. Sophie says we have to help you, but I don’t like you enough to help you with that.”

Kitty studied her for a long moment. “I’m not sorry,” she said finally. “You’re a criminal, and it was my job to bring you and your compatriots in to justice.”

Parker shrugged. “I get that. Probably better than you think, actually. I am glad I decided not to bring Eliot to question you though.” Reaching out, she took Kitty’s hand. “I get what it’s like to be broken. I hope you find somebody someday who can help you not be broken.” She paused, and Kitty realized she’d sensed Sophie coming into position behind her. Thief and grifter exchanged a look full of meaning, before Parker looked at Kitty again.

“Or maybe somebody who can help you not be broken so much. That would be good too.”


End file.
